Democracy, Death and the Maiden

I was horrified that Mark dT's father told him that what this country needs is a "benign dictator."

I hear the same blithe toss-off, "What this country needs..." prescriptions for violence from the left too.
We talk this way, I suspect, because we don't know what dictatorship or revolution is really like.

I recommend Death and the Maiden (1994, dir. Roman Polanski) as a primer for how dictators "suppress the opposition" (such a benign term) and what this does to individuals.

I'd first heard about this film when I researched Chile. It's based on a play by Chilean Ariel Dorfman, who went into hiding after the military ousted President Salvador Allende on 9/11 (1973).

Sigourney Weaver plays a woman in Chile who was tortured under the "benign" dictator Pinochet, head of the army.

(Some people said he wasn't all that bad when he died last year. How bad do you have to be before you're not in the "benign" category anymore?)

Fifteen years later, after the fall of the dictatorship, a man (Ben Kingsley) gives this woman's husband a ride home when his car breaks down.
When he comes in for a drink, the woman recognizes him, by his voice and his smell, as the doctor who tortured her while she was blindfolded, setting the stage for a psychological and political confrontation.
[Note: there aren't any graphic visual flashbacks.]

When I hear about dreadful things happening to hundreds, thousands, millions of people, my mind and emotions kind of blank out.
A movie like this, about two people caught up, face to face, in political violence, makes it real to me.
And one of its themes is how civilized people give in to the thrill of violence--how quickly we will sign up for violent "solutions."

There're plenty worse things than being bored by democratic processes.

P.S. "Death and the Maiden" is part of Franz Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, which the doctor played while he tormented the charges he was supposed to be helping.